Extreme Tourism

By Playboy.com StaffJune 27, 2012

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We venture across the globe to discover the most dangerous travel destinations you can bet your life on.

When we first saw the trailer for the ill-conceived Chernobyl Diaries a few months ago, the only thing less shocking than a movie studio making a cash grab over a tragedy was that by turning it into some mutated zombie flick, audiences wouldn’t appreciate what really did go down outside Reactor Number Four.

Though studios are infamous for injecting some form of drama into historical films (see: Titanic), playing off our fear of nuclear deformation is never a great idea.

What the film did get right, however, is that you can still visit the site today. As scary as that sounds, officials are fairly certain that low-level contamination, timed visits and carrying a Geiger counter (radiation monitoring device) are sufficient precautions to let you poke around. Though if your sperm mutates down the road, don’t hold us accountable!

Along with Chernobyl, here are a few other crazy tourist destinations to check out if you’re in need of an adventure. Just do us a favor and survive; we’d rather not lose our readers to near-certain death.

CHERNOBYL

On April 26, 1986 an explosion at the Chernobyl power plant a couple hours outside of Kiev, Soviet Union (now Ukraine) released massive quantities of radioactive material into the atmosphere. While the related loss of life has been argued over at length by officials and international organizations, figures range from the low thousands to the hundreds of thousands. A substantial contributor to this was that the nearby workers’ city of Pripyat was not immediately evacuated during the crisis, exposing thousands of families to the radiation and potentially closing the region for settlement in the future. This ghost city is now a tourist destination for those thrill seekers who want to experience going back over 25 years in the past to a city stuck in time.

Check tours out HERE

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MT. HUASHAN TRAIL

If you’ve ever experienced a fear of heights while flying, hiking or standing on an observation platform, then we would definitely not recommend this less-traveled tourist trail. Located in Shaanxi province, near the city of Huayin, China, the Mount Huashan path winds 7.5 miles up to the summit, at times, as in the video above, with barely a foot between you and plummeting to your death thousands of feet below. While this isn’t the only “hanging on for dear life” experience you can find in the world, it does rank as one of the most unstable (note the fraying nails). As there seems to be a lack of hand rails, we’d strongly suggest you buy the optional safety harness.

Check it out HERE.

Click below for the world’s most dangerous border and the infamous road of death.

KOREAN DEMILITARIZED ZONE

When it comes to international security of late, the only thing that can cause a global freak-out faster than Iran playing hooky with U.N. Atomic Inspectors is North Korean military antics. Now led by hot-headed late-twenty-something Kim Jong-un, whose apparent need to placate the legacies of his infamous father and grandfather seems to consist of threatening all his neighbors with imminent doom and testing nuclear arms delivery missiles that never seem to work. That being said, the world’s most unstable quasi-nuclear nation is still technically at war with its southern brethren, which makes a trip to the dividing line a must for any adventurous visitor. Considering the number of deaths over the years from accidental incursions, illegal tunnels and other obscurities (including the aforementioned war possibilities), this is definitely a thrill stop.

Check it out HERE.

NORTH YUNGAS ROAD

You know that feeling when traveling in the U.K. the first time you start driving on the “wrong side of the road”? Take that sense of wrongness, add some speed, language confusion and at least 2000 feet of sheer drop and you will have found yourself at North Yungas Road in Bolivia, also known as the Road of Death (cue grave musical motif). As this 40-mile stretch between La Paz and Coroico claims an estimated 200 to 300 lives per year, it’s no wonder the Inter-American Development bank has named this trip the “world’s most dangerous road.” If the dust, fog and speeding locals don’t kill you, trying to pass an oncoming car with less than 10 feet of space between you and death is one adventure you might be literally taking to the grave. Check out the good guys over at Top Gear testing it out a few years back (above); at least they had a film crew to fish them out if need be!